Books-Birds
Category archives for Books-Birds
Waterfowl of North America, Europe, and Asia: Beautiful new book
Posted by Greg Laden on March 18, 2016 
There are three kinds of books that count as animal (usually bird) guides. 1) A pocket field guide of the critters of a reasonably circumscribed geographical area, like the Peterson Field Guide to Birds of Eastern and Central North America. This is a small book that can fit in a big pocket, and a classic…
Wildlife Of The Galapagos: Updated Field Guide (Review)
Posted by Greg Laden on March 4, 2016 
Wildlife of the Galápagos: Second Edition (Princeton Pocket Guides), by Julian Fitter, Daniel Fitter, and David Hosking is both a field guide and a travel guide, focusing on the Galapagos Islands. It includes basic information about each island and each town or tourist destination, and a comprehensive guide to how to visit, what to bring…
Feeding Wild Birds
Posted by Greg Laden on February 21, 2016 
When the Texas A&M University Press asked me to consider reviewing Feeding Wild Birds in America: Culture, Commerce, and Conservation by Paul Baicich, Margaret Barker, and Carrol Henderson, I had mixed feelings. Was this just another backyard bird feeding guide? That would be nice, but not too exciting. After all, feeding birds is just a…
Books On Birds And Nature
Posted by Greg Laden on November 25, 2015 
Here we look mainly at bird books, but I wanted to also mention a couple of other items on non-birds. I’ve mixed in some new books along with a few other books that have come out over the last couple of years, but that are still very current, very amazing books, and since they have…
The Brain: An Illustrated History of Neuroscience
Posted by Greg Laden on November 19, 2015 
In 1817, Karl August Weinhold had a go at a real-life Frankenstein’s monster — only in his version he uses a cat. The German scooped out the brain and spinal cord of a recently dead cat. He then pured a molten mixture of zinc and silver into the skull and spinal cavity. He was attempting…
Ten Thousand Birds
Posted by Greg Laden on September 13, 2014 
There are over 10,000 species of bird on the Earth today. There is one blog called “10,000 Birds” for which I write a monthly article, in case you did not know. But this post is about Ten Thousand Birds: Ornithology Since Darwin, a book by Tim Birkhead, Jo Wimpenny and Bob Monegomerie. Birds and various…
Rare Birds of North America
Posted by Greg Laden on September 12, 2014 
Rare Birds of North America is the only extensive treatment I’ve see of the so called “vagrant birds” in the US and Canada. Most, or at least many, traditional bird books have a section in the back for rare birds, occasionals or accidentals, which one might see now and then. But when you think about…
Penguins: The Ultimate Guide
Posted by Greg Laden on September 9, 2014 
There is a new book out on Penguins: Penguins: The Ultimate Guide written and edited by Tui De Roy, Mark Jones, and Julie Cornthwaite. It is a beautiful coffee table style book full of information. All of the world’s species are covered (amazingly there are only 18 of them) and there are more than 400…
Flying Dinosaurs: A New Book on the Dinosaur Bird Link
Posted by Greg Laden on September 3, 2014 
Flying Dinosaurs: How Fearsome Reptiles Became Birds by science writer John Pickrell is coming out in December. As you know I’ve written a lot about the bird-dinosaur thing (most recently, this: “Honey I Shrunk the Dinosaurs“) so of course this sounded very interesting to me. In a way, Pickrell’s book is a missing link, in…
The World’s Rarest Birds
Posted by Greg Laden on April 6, 2013 
There are something over 10,000 species of birds (thus the name of the famous blog). Of these, just under 600 are in very very serious trouble, some to the extent that we are not sure if they exist, others are so rare that we know they exist but there are no good photographs of them,…